THOUGH JUST A DAY PAST ITS SELL-BY, IT DOES SMELL A BIT IFFY.

BOMPAS AND PARR

It is a truth universally acknowledged that anyone who has read Pride and Prejudice thinks a witty way of starting any piece of unrelated writing is by saying ‘it is a truth universally acknowledged’. It is also a truth universally acknowledged that any rush hour London commuter must be in want of a Metro newspaper on the way into work, and an Evening Standard on the way home.

And let’s not forget Time Out on a Tuesday.

AFB is old enough to remember when Time Out was a humble listings magazine. It had a decent comedy section, and I even remember a time when my own name appeared in the comedy listings under some twenty-seventh-rate open mic gig in Kentish Town.

No longer.

Time Out is now the exclusive preserve of wankstains: the kind of people who like their dresses floral, their shoes sans-sock, their cocktails in mugs, their bread artisanal and their humour irrroooonnnniiicccc. The people who write for Time Out are exactly the sort of people who would begin an article by saying ‘it is a truth universally acknowledged’. Much like Vice magazine, it has become the bastion of the very hipster it purports, lamely, to vilify.

Nowhere is this wankstainery better personified than in the foodie duo Bompas and Parr. I have counted, over the last few months, several articles across the free London media detailing the ‘clever’ exploits of this pair of bobbins.

For those of you lucky, lucky people who have no idea what I’m going on about, B&P create ‘food art’. They make jelly sculptures! They create breathable cocktails! They penetrate each other with chocolate dildos!* They bumble around looking very pleased with themselves, twatting on about ‘synesthesia’, doing stuff that nobody ever dreamed about doing before with food! And the Time Out-reading Floras and Hugos lap it up.

Needless to say, AFB has never sampled any of B&P’s wares. Why would we? We’ve got better things to do, like, I dunno, eat food. Pass the feckin Ginsters, mate.

In 1999, Billy Childish and Charles Thomson founded the Stuckist art movement, to promote traditional, figurative painting in the light of what they perceived as the dull-witted proliferation of conceptual art. AFB likes to think of itself as the culinary analogue of the Stuckists.

We challenge Bompas and Parr to a naked wrestling match in a marshmallow swimming pool filled with caramelised pigshit. That’s the kind of thing they’re no doubt into.